Nat 'King' Cole - The Christmas Song

This is perhaps the Platonic Christmas song. 

Art Carney and Johnny Carson jam together

I never knew he could play the piano, or that Johnny could play drums.  Or that Sid Caesar could play sax.

Calvin Jackson and George Stoll - Concerto For Index Finger featuring Gracie Allen

The Queen Of The World and I like watching the old TV shows ('50s, '60s, and '70s).  One of these is The George Burns Show, the star of which really is Gracie Allen who would steal the show pretty much every time.  Well, TQOTW discovered this gem from the last film appearance by Gracie, the 1944 film Two Girls And A Sailor.  It had an all star cast but Gracie stole the show with this hilarious number.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

S.S. United States to be evicted from its pier?

The Queen Of The World sent me this sad story:

The ship's remarkable speed earned it the coveted Blue Riband award from Great Britain upon its maiden voyage in 1952. Partially sponsored by the U.S. government during the Cold War era, it was designed as a potential rapid troop carrier if geopolitical tensions escalated, according to the website for the SS United States Conservancy, the nonprofit organization that has overseen the vessel since 2011.

Despite its high level of regard and rich history, the ship faces an uncertain future as it languishes at Pier 82 in south Philadelphia. Its retirement has been fraught with challenges, including the recent threat of eviction due to a lawsuit from Pier 82's landlord, Penn Warehousing, according to an NPR report on Monday, March 11.

The lawsuit alleges the SS United States Conservancy owes between $700,000 and $800,000 in back rent, Warren Jones, one of the conservancy's board members, told the radio station. He said the organization entered into the agreement more than a decade ago, and during the pandemic, the rent was unjustly doubled.

This story is of interest to TQOTW, since she actually was a passenger on that ship.  Her dad was in the Air Force and posted to the UK in the early 1960s; they returned from PCS on this.  It's sad to see what the ship has become from what it used to be.  TQOTW watched this with me and remembered all sorts of things, like the signal flags at the swimming pool.

That was a different world, and people would rather spend 8 hours on a plane than 5 days on a ship, even one as grand as the United States.

 

Battleship U.S.S. Texas afloat today

And back at dock after an extensive repair and refit.  Don't mess with Texas' battleships.

This is a very long video of this morning's short voyage.

Arthur Fiedler & The Boston Pops Orchestra, Pops Christmas Party 1959

The mid-20th Century was the high point of the much appreciated and much lamented in its passing "Mid-Brow"* culture: a set of societal expectations that a properly educated man or woman should know certain (respectable) things and behave in certain (respectable) ways.  One of these things that people were expected to know was classical music.  There were two great popularizers of mid-brow music: Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Fiedler.

Bernstein was a musical genius, who wrote fabulous music.  "West Side Story" is perhaps most famous, but "Candide" is perhaps his greatest composition.  Of course he was a dirty commie bastard, but there's no denying his influence on the Mid-Brow public.

Arthur Fiedler was the long time conductor of the Boston Symphony and (more famously) the Boston Pops which became perhaps the most famous Mid-Brow orchestra ever.  Fiedler joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1915 (!) and graduated to cunductor in 1930.  He remained conductor of the Symphony and the Pops for the next half century.

His career was the apogee of Mid-Brow culture in America.  All 3 networks plus PBS covered the July 4, 1976 Pops concert from Boston live.  All of them.  After all, people were expected to behave in particular (respectable) ways.

Alas for the America of my youth.  Here's a delightful musical album of the 1959 Boston Pops Christmas.  Sadly, Youtube tells me that this has only 173 views.  Alas for the America of my youth, indeed.

* Not the hoity-toity High Brow set, and certainly not the Low Brow set.  Mid-Brow, the sweet spot.

Cowboy Junkies - Blue Moon Revisited

Ambisinistral at YARGB has a regular Friday feature, showcasing off-beat and unusual (well, to me at least) music groups.  It's a delight, and you should check it out.  Today it's Heidi Feek with her unbelievably sultry contralto version of Elvis' hit Blue Moon.  I'd never heard of her before, and it is a great intro to her.

But it made me think of The Cowboy Junkies, back in the day of Big Hair.  To my taste, this was their greatest song.

I only want to say That if there is a way I want my baby back with me 'cause he's my true love My only one don't you see? And on that fateful day Perhaps in the new sun of May My baby walks back into my arms I'll keep him beside me Forever from harm You see I was afraid To let my baby stray I kept him too tightly by my side And then one sad day He went away and he died Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone Without a dream in my heart Without a love of my own Blue Moon, you knew just what I was there for You heard me saying a prayer for Someone I really could care for I only want to say That if there is a way I want my baby back with me 'cause he's my true love My only one don't you see

Ambisinistral, thanks for this musical waltz down memory lane.  The Queen Of The World will think I'm being too nostalgic, but you know how sentimental I can be.  Especially when Big Hair is involved.  Did you know that The Queen Of The World had great Big Hair?  Very grrrr, Baby!

Making Battleship Ice Cream

Specifically, World War II Navy ice cream.  It looks pretty good, and the powdered milk and powdered eggs don't look like they are inferior substitutes for the fresh ingredients.  Plus a discussion of just how important ice cream was to morale.  Pretty cool. 

Clint Black and Roy Rogers - Hold On Partner

This is a delightful blast from the past won a Grammy in 1991.  It's striking just how much Clint Black looked like Roy Rogers.

Tom Lehrer - So Long Mom (A Song For WWIII)

Seemingly everything old is new again.  Apocalypse Nostalgia, anyone? 

Hope for the younger generation

John Wilder has a very thought provoking post.  It's long bit highly, highly recommended.  He ends what would be a depressing post with, well, hope.  Stuff like this:

Amen, John.  Amen.  I have some of that here.

Please, no Black Pill comments.

Go for a stroll underneath a battleship

Dwight visits the dry-docked USS Texas.  He also buys a souvenir bit of USS Texas steel.  Somewhere, #2 Son has some souvenir deck teak from the USS North Carolina.

The Dillards - Buckin' Mule

The Queen Of The World and I love bluegrass.  It's an old type of music, but until the 1960s was pretty much confined to the Appalachian region of the country.  But it got introduced to the broader country on The Andy Griffith Show, with the Darling family (played by The Dillards).  Certainly it made The Dillards famous; here they are performing on The Judy Garland Show in '63 or '64. 

Here they are performing with Andy on his show.  This may be the finest version of Dooley ever recorded.

Post-Boxing Day post about boxing

YARGB has a post up about the old school bare-knuckle boxers and how their exaggerated stance wasn't stupid.  To the contrary:

To modern eyes the stance of the old-time bare-knuckle brawlers looks ridiculous, but it actually served a purpose. Due to the risk of hurting their hands by hitting the bones of the skull, head punches were less common. Although they would hit the chin and face, most of the punches were thrown at the body. That meant the boxers lowered their defense to guard against body shots.

This is a nifty post that shows that (a) our ancestors were actually pretty smart and adaptable and (b) when we think they were being dumb, it's very likely that we're the ones being dumb because we don't know what they knew.

YARGB's post jumped out at me because of a nifty book that The Queen Of The World got me for Christmas: Mike Silver's The Arc Of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science.  I ran across this on Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast when he interviewed Silver.  The podcast starts from the premise that Boxing is the only modern sport where the athletes of past ages are better than modern athletes.

This struck a chord with me.  Way back in the day, we used to enjoy Friday Night Fights on network TV.  This was back in the Muhammad Ali era and I used to really look forward to the show.  I was never what you'd call a devotee of the Sweet Science, but there's no question that the sport has degenerated into what Silver calls a "Human Demolition Derby".

Silver's book is convincing.  The lack of skill among today's boxers is glaring, even to a novice viewer like me.  The footwork is gone, the weave in is gone, the feint is gone.  Looking at some of Ali's matches on Youtube shows what we've lost.  "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" has turned into "take a punch to give a punch".  In Silver's view, the craftsmanship is gone.

I highly recommend anyone remotely interested in the subject to listen to Carlin's interview with Silver.  In this day of champions with 30 or 40 professional bouts, I hadn't known about Harry Greb, "The Pittsburgh Windmill" who fought 328 professional bouts.  Of course Greb had more skill than today's boxers, because he had ten times the experience.

Boxing was always a tough sport, but it wasn't as dangerous as it is today.  Fighters were much better matched than today; back then, being a "contender" meant so much that it became the centerpiece of the story in the film On The Waterfront.  There was much more of a focus on body shots (rather than head shots).  Defensive skills were sharp because a fighter had to fight often to pay the rent and if he got too beat up he couldn't fight.

Silver's book is an ode to a lost world - in my mind a much more interesting world than today's.  But the world is gone - Carlin asks Silver if today's boxing fans would like watching old bouts from the great fighters in the past.  Silver replies that they wouldn't, because they wouldn't understand anything that they saw.  It was a lot more interesting to watch back in the '70s, before it was nothing but knockouts and ear biting.

The podcast, the book, and YARGB's post are highly recommended.

Country Joe McDonald - Save The Whales

52 years ago today, the Oregon Highway Division tried to remove a whale carcass.  With dynamite. 

Now there's a country music song for just about anything, but not this.  The closest I could find was this one from Country Joe McDonald (front man for Country Joe and the Fish).  It's very 1970s earnest but that makes it a bit of a time capsule.  Looking back, you can see just how much has changed in the last half century.

The Democratic Party loses the signal

Electronic communications rely on the concept of a Carrier Wave.  Basically, this is a well-defined electronic signal that all devices can "tune" into, and upon which the actual message is transmitted.  If you lose the carrier, you lose your connection and you can't communicate with anybody.

You Old Farts will remember the old dial-up modem days.  You see, most houses back in the paleolithic age (say, the 1990s) only had one phone line.  Hen Junior wanted to jump on Compuserve (or, Lord forbid, America Online), his biggest worry was often that Mom would pick up the phone to call a friend.  When the phone went off-hook, the carrier signal went all skew-wumpus* and the modem connection dropped.  There was even a long running BBS joke Hey! Wait! Don't pick up the ph{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER

Good times, good times.

Well, the Democratic Party has had control of the carrier wave to the American people for a long, long time.  The first post I tagged Biased Media was way back in 2008, and it was obvious even back then.  They've been used to jamming the Republicans access to the Carrier for a long time.  This has given the Democrat's a big advantage for a long, long time.

That's been going away for a long, long time.  Reagan beat Carter, and then whats-his-name from Minnesota.  The Republicans swept control of Congress in the 1990s.  The whole "Bush lied" (about Iraq) dates back to Hillary Clinton who needed Media air cover for her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion in 2003.  Sure, Obama won in 2008 but the 2010 elections decimated the Democratic Party, as the country reacted in revulsion to the far left-wing policies of his administration.

In my counting, that's 40 years of increasing rejection of the Democratic Party's narrative pushed by an increasingly weak and irrelevant media.

And so here we are at today.  We've had two mass shootings in as many weeks, and three or four in the last couple of months.  It's so perfectly set up to support the Democratic narrative that people are wondering if this is yet more FBI instigation**.  And yet, it's not moving the needle in the Democrat's favor.  Consider:

• Senate Majority Leader (Democrat) Chuck Schumer has refused to move forward with a gun control bill.  This is despite all the recent mass shootings.  Schumer may be a jerk but he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to look at what the polls say about issues.  The American people are entirely uninterested in more gun control, and forcing his party to put their necks on that chopping block is something that he (wisely) will not do.
• Covid is over, and every time a (Democrat) politician or bureaucrat suggests further lock downs or restrictions this "news" disappears from the media in a day.  It's political suicide, any why the Democrats would love to ride that crisis further, they know they'd just ride it into the ditch.
• Russia! Russia! Russia! is over.  Polls are starting to show that people want sanctions to end so we can import oil from them to drop gas prices.  The joke is I can't believe that it's MonkeyPox season!  I still have my Ukraine decorations up!
  

• Oh, yeah - I forgot all about the riots.  And MonkeyPox?  Bitch, please.

Each of these has had a shelf life measured between 2 months and 2 days, but the lifetime is shortening.  And as this has played out, Joe Biden's approval ratings have continued sinking.  He's now the least popular "President" since Harry Truman.  That's 70 years.  If you actually remember Harry Truman, you're really, really old.  Polls repeatedly show that people would prefer Republican candidates over Democrat ones by 5, or 8, or 10 points.

My point is that the media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) is that crisis after crisis after crisis, all blamed on the Republicans, or Vladimir Putin, or White People have had precisely zero effect.  Nada. Nichto.  ничто.  无.

So to my point - The Democrats are very unpopular, and are getting increasingly unpopular.  The Media has lost all ability to change this trajectory.  We will leave for another day the question of whether the Republicans will be any better, but in all honesty - could they possibly be worse?***

We will also leave for another day the question of how legitimacy is established in a "Western Democracy" when elections are repeatedly stolen.  There's no question that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are up to this, and since "free and fair elections" are the bedrock of the American sense of political legitimacy, what happens when this is under minded needs to be explored in more detail.****

I shall endeavor to address these open items this weekend.  But I maintain what I said ten years ago after another notorious mass shooting: no new gun control laws are on offer.  And if Republican s are smart, after the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade they should counter all gun control proposals with "Common Sense" abortion control proposals.  You'd have to pop popcorn to enjoy the meltdown that would induce.

* Technical term in computer networking, I was told.

** Remember the jury that refused to convict the people who were "plotting to kidnap" the Michigan Governor because almost all of the folks who were involved were FBI? 

*** Spoiler alert: maybe.

**** Spoiler alert: nothing good.

100 years of Gummi Bears

Haribo introduced Gummi Bears 100 years ago:

The first production plant was a copper kettle in his kitchen and his first employee was his wife Gertrud. He’d make hard candies and she’d deliver them on her bicycle. In 1922, Riegel invented a new confection: the Tanzbären, or Dancing Bear. It was a soft fruit-flavored candy shaped like a bear sitting on its hind legs, inspired by the sad performing bears that were so popular at the time.

 Interesting article which includes a bit on where the name "Haribo" came from.

Dad Joke CLXXXVIIII

A mime is a terrible thing to waste. 

Who here remembers Animaniacs (good Lord, can it really be 30 years ago?) and their "Mime Time" segments?

Shirley Ellis - The Clapping Song

The Queen Of The World brought an idea to me - songs which all you Old Farts will recognize.  She was singing to me - this song - and I thought she'd lost her mind.  Instead, she was leading me to (ahem) Old Fart crowd pleasers.

I probably will make this a regular feature, although I cannot rely on the ever-youthful TQOTW for material.  For you Old Farts, I mean.

Damn, I remember 1965.  I guess I'm an Old Fart.

Alan Jackson - The Older I Get

Long time reader and friend in real life libertyman emails to point out that Alan Jackson has a new album. 

Released last month, it's Jackson's first album in 7 years.  It also marks a milestone: Jackson has released albums in five successive decades ('80s - '20s).  I don't know if that's a record, but I don't know that it isn't.

Jackson needs no introduction unless you don't follow country music, but he's sold 75 million albums, received 2 Grammys and more CMA and ACM awards than you can shake a stick at.  He's been a perennial favorite of people who like the traditional country sound - both The Queen Of The World and I have listened to him for (mumble) decades.  Since I'm still in my prime, I plan to follow his music for more decades.

Quite frankly, it's nice to see this album.  I confess that I'm not a fan of the new Nashville Country Pop that fills the airwaves these days.  Jackson's new album is country music comfort food.

The Older I Get (Songwriters: Adam Wright, Sarah Turner, Hailey Whitters)

The older I get
The more I think
You only get a minute
Better live while you're in it
'Cause it's gone in a blink

And the older I get
The truer it is
It's the people you love
Not the money and stuff
That makes you rich

And if they found a fountain of youth
I wouldn't drink a drop
And that's the truth
Funny how it feels I'm just gettin' to
My best years yet

The older I get
The fewer friends I have
But you don't need a lot
When the ones that you've got
Have always got your back

And the older I get
The better I am
At knowing when to give
And when to just not give a damn

And if they found a fountain of youth
I wouldn't drink a drop
And that's the truth
Funny how it feels I'm just gettin' to
My best years yet
The older I get

And I don't mind all the lines
From all the times
I've laughed and cried
Souvenirs and little signs
Of the life I've lived

The older I get
The longer I pray
I don't know why
I guess that I've got more to say
And the older I get
The more thankful I feel
For the life I've had
And all the life I'm living still

libertyman, thanks for pointing this song out.